Howker / Malik Jilted Generation

How Britain Has Bankrupted Its Youth
1. Auflage 2013
ISBN: 978-1-84831-624-9
Verlag: Icon Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 304 Seiten

'Should be read as a strident call to arms for a partially disenfranchised generation that is burdened with debt.'The Times 'No parent can dismiss this argument about our collective failure to invest in the future' The Guardian Why are so many adult children living still living with mum and dad? Why do young people seem so disinterested in politics? And what are the hidden threats to Britain's long-term prosperity lurking in the next few decades? First published in 2010, Ed Howker and Shiv Mailk's Jilted Generation answers fundamental questions about the society you thought you knew. It identified, for the first time, the perilous position of Britain's young adults and, with a title brandished by everyone from Ed Miliband to student protesters, the book's thesis has formed a controversial but essential part of Britain's political debate. With significant additional material, this edition updates the argument and explains the real effects of austerity policies and the recession. And, crucially, it explains what must be done to protect a vital and underestimated national asset - Britain's newest adults.

Ed Howker is a programme-maker for Channel 4's Dispatches. Shiv Malik is an investigative journalist at the Guardian. Both live in London.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Howker, Ed

Malik, Shiv

Leseproben

PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION

We are sometimes tempted to think that history repeats itself, that one government is just like the last, that one generation is just like the one that came before it, that nothing really changes. But history moves in mysterious ways.

Most mysterious of all is the plight of the group this book dubs the jilted generation – those born from the end of the 1970s onwards – who now face a future more precarious, more impoverished in income and of spirit than either they or their parents expected.

The statistics that describe this age-group are peculiarly worse than those that apply to older generations now, and previous generations at a similar point in their life-cycle. You will see the facts laid bare in the following pages.

The jilted generation are not simply being held back by recession and austerity but by a deeper problem and it stems from that myopia that allows us to tell ourselves that nothing really changes and so the future can look after itself. It does not.

However, this book is not merely an act of special pleading by youth about youth. It should matter to everyone. History moves on, the youth grow up. Today’s school leavers are tomorrow’s workers, parents and taxpayers. So if the prospects of a younger generation suffer, so must everyone else for inescapable economic reasons: when unemployment becomes focused on the generation that should be driving the economy, they cannot fuel growth. Unable to earn money, they cannot spend it. The next generation struggle to pay the taxes that are needed to fund debt repayments, pensions, healthcare – services upon which the oldest and youngest generations around them rely. Demand for goods and services slackens. People find it harder to realise their hopes.

The effects can also be felt more immediately by other generations. When young people are held back the older generation are forced to pick up the pieces – just ask the millions of parents continuing to support adult children in the family home, still topping up their income, still wondering what went wrong.

In the three years since this book was first published, politicians on the right and the left have finally acknowledged that young people face a crisis but, in an era in which we might be tempted to think that nothing changes, it is to be expected that they have few new ideas to resolve it.

At the extremes, the left have been busy thinking up ways to blame ‘the rich’ for what has happened, while the right blame individuals’ fecklessness and big government. Both sides have used this book as a stick with which to beat their opponents. The Tories have claimed that Labour ‘created the jilted generation’, Labour say the Coalition are only making matters worse.1 Neither party’s activities in office escape criticism in the following pages. Meanwhile, those who feel threatened by our ideas complain with full throats and half wits that we seek to fight a generational battle pitting the young against the old. We do not. This book seeks to put bad ideas, not ‘baby boomers’, pensioners, or our parents on trial.

If political battles are to be fought about the issues we raise, they will not look like those which have come before. In the sixties, young activists marched on Grosvenor Square to protest against the Vietnam war outside the US Embassy, now hacktivist members of the jilted generation launch ‘Denial Of Service’ attacks from the computers in their bedrooms. The Beatles rebuked the ‘Taxman’, now there are protests against tax-avoidance. It used to be said that young people don’t do politics. That is wrong. Young people’s political concerns have evolved and so have the forms of their expression: sometimes insightful, sometimes incoherent, sometimes violent, unpredictable, networked, immediate; they just don’t do politics like they used to.

Britain’s current party leaders are young. They think they know the new generation of adults. We doubt it. This book is for them. It is for every parent still wondering why their well-educated and diligent child is living at home in their early thirties; for every school-leaver who finds that society offers no job for them and that cleaning floors in Poundland is the price of their dole money; it is for every member of Britain’s new generation who think their unemployment and hopelessness are their own fault, and for everyone else standing by wondering what has gone wrong.

To unravel the mystery of this generation today, we need to begin with its most vulnerable part – those who are entering the adult world of work for the first time and discovering that there are few jobs, few mechanisms for achieving their ambitions and few paths to true adulthood. A typical example of them is Caitlin Reilly. Reilly was not a rioter. She is not a political militant. She studied geology and wants to work as a museum curator. She is an unlikely activist with an even more unlikely cause – for more effective employment policies. And the truth of her story is not one either the left or the right want to hear, which is unfortunate, because it outlines the shape of things to come.

The jilted generation go to work

At the start of 2012, Reilly and a 41-year-old landscape gardener called Jamieson Wilson began legal action against the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. The pair, and hundreds of thousands like them, had been placed on employment schemes in which the jobless are put to work unpaid in Tesco, Primark and other high street stores and charities, compelled by the threat of having their benefits stripped.

Schemes in which the unemployed are compelled to work for their benefits are known as ‘workfare’ after the punitive employment policies designed by the Nixon administration. The Coalition call their policies ‘Mandatory Work Activity’, ‘Steps to Work’, even ‘The Young People Trailblazer’. Whatever you call them, the schemes targeted at the jilted generation began with the best of intentions.

With youth unemployment in Britain spiking above one million soon after David Cameron assumed office, the Coalition felt compelled to act quickly to solve the problem. In the era of austerity, the government was reluctant to invest resources to help them but it considered that the young could learn skills by doing work experience.

Business leaders were invited to 10 Downing Street. Would they, it was asked, help provide experience? Could young people be placed in their businesses? It did not seem to take much persuading for a raft of multi-national corporations to offer temporary positions in their workforce to the unemployed, providing, of course, that they didn’t have to pay them.

Unclear in those early stages, however, was the element of compulsion in the schemes. Thousands of unemployed young people received letters threatening their benefits if they did not ‘volunteer’. If young people simply ‘expressed verbal interest’ in the scheme at the Job Centre they were compelled to participate; if they did not or quit once in position, their benefits would be cut off. And those who refused and subsequently became long-term unemployed would be forced to undertake ‘Mandatory Work Activity’ unpaid and lasting as long as six months. Some, like Reilly, were simply forced into work experience by Job Centre caseworkers who appeared unsure of the rules.

To keep her £53 Jobseeker’s Allowance, Reilly cancelled her work experience in a local museum – a placement which she had organised herself – and took a three-week position in Poundland stacking shelves and cleaning. That was in 2011. A year later, workfare was endemic, even making an appearance during the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee.

The night before London prepared to celebrate the anniversary by sending the largest flotilla of boats ever assembled down the Thames, two coaches arrived from the West Country carrying stewards for the big event.

Security firm Close Protection UK (CPUK) had been hired at great expense to marshal the event but their employees were as cheap as they come. Some were on apprentice wages, 30 were on workfare schemes – working for nothing but the threat of having their benefits removed.

The coaches arrived earlier than expected and so the organisers herded their wards beneath the arches of London Bridge where they were instructed to roll out their mats and sleeping bags on the pavement and sleep rough before the big day.

CPUK offered a carrot as well as a stick: if the workfarers passed this test – and demonstrated that they were willing to work a fourteen-hour day without bathroom or bed – they might be offered paid work at the Olympics later in the year.

As dawn broke and forecasts predicted downpours, the stewards were offered a sandwich in a sodden paper bag and told to change into their work clothes ready to safeguard the nation’s splendour. Afterwards, they were taken to a swampy campsite outside London for the night.

A scheme that began with the best of intentions had transformed into a mechanism for exploitation.

Since the schemes began few jobseekers had complained publicly. Even those workfarers who shared their experiences at the Jubilee did so on the condition of anonymity. The threat of penury is a great silencer. But neither Caitlin Reilly nor Jamieson Wilson stayed quiet. By the time of the Jubilee, their judicial review was in full swing.

Judicial reviews – when judges examine whether laws, regulations and processes are lawful – seldom succeed. At best, a few statutory tweaks are made. Reilly and Wilson made two claims: workfare schemes breached their human...